Sometimes, a delayed response to a customer's need or request, such as in an order fulfillment market, especially when dealing in millions of dollars, can cause a loss of the order. Order fulfillment, for example, may be the complete process from point of sales inquiry to delivery of a product to the customer. Sometimes order fulfillment is used to describe a narrower act of distribution or the logistics function. However, in the broader sense it refers to the way how firms respond to customer orders. For instance, thousand of orders have to be placed into the order fulfillment channel on a daily basis and many touch points which need to be performed by customer sales representatives. Processing and management of an order has been divided into multiple stages and also handled by multiple customer service representatives. They may include backlog customer service representatives, workflow customer service representatives, order change customer service representatives, and billing customer service representatives, who in turn most often will need to perform update changes to the same order concurrently when a request is received from the customer. With the existing functionality in databases today, the user cannot perform simultaneous write or update access to the same key data with the same table by different users. If a first user in the order has update access, then the entire order will be completely locked by the first user until he/she exits out of update access mode of the order. The update limitation functionality existing in the current environment today will cause a major customer satisfaction issue, as well as the company may be facing lost sale to other competitors.
The current object update options for tables and sales documents were deemed not acceptable for critical updates due to the requirement for multiple concurrent updates for the various users to enhance productivity. Also, over-writing of previous users' data without warning allowed for problems with updates not occurring when the users thought they were completed.